Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel: Informal Communication and the Aristocratic Context of Discovery

Abstract

That a period of scientific revolution coincided with a period of theological, social and economic change in Europe is an obvious commonplace in literature dealing with the history of early modern science. The question of how specific elements in sixteenth-century society affected the actual process of discovery and the diffusion of new ideas is less clearly understood. In particular, the structure of informal methods of scientific interaction which made possible the transmission of new procedures, discoveries, and technical innovations among mathematicians, astronomers, and naturalists prior to the development of formal scientific organizations,has been left, for the most part,unexplored. One of the aims of this study, then, is to delineate an important mode of scientific interaction during the late Renaissance by examining the role of princely courts in the construction of informal patterns of scientific and technical information exchange. Among various forms of aristocratic patronage, it is possible to reconstruct a special type of courtly involvement characterized by the direct participation of princes in scientific and technical projects. Such courts not only provided an environment for the development of technical proficiency and innovation but also were capable of initiating vast networks of scientific correspondence based upon pre-existing religious and political avenues of communication.

The term is used by Herbert Menzel, Planning the Consequences of Unplanned Action in Scientific Communication, in Communication in Science: Documentation and Automation, ed. De Reuck et al. (Boston, 1967), 57–71. Idem., Informal Communication in Science: Its Advantages and Its Formal Analogue in The Foundations of Access to Knowledge, ed. Edward B. Montgomery (New York, 1968 ), pp. 153–163.

Max Engelmann, Sammlung Mensing: Altwissenschaftliche Instrumente (Amsterdam, 1924), p. 34, number 237. A second sundial signed Ό. H. P. (Ott-Heinrich Pfalzgraf) was discovered in 1970 by the curators of the Mensing collection, Adler Planetarium, Chicago, as part of a private collection in Amsterdam.

Westman, The Melanchthon Circle…, loc. cit. Students at Wittenberg most likely encountered the ideas of Copernicus initially through Erasmus Reinhold’s commentary on Peurbach’s Theoricae Novae Planetarum (1542), a basic text in astronomy. See: Owen Gingerich, The Role of Erasmus Reinhold and the Prutenic Tables in the Dissemination of the Copernican Theory, Colloquia Copernicana 2 (Warsaw, 1973 ), 43–62.

This correspondence is published by Tycho Brahe in his Epistolae Astronomicarum (Uraniburgi, 1596).

Murhardsche Bibliothek, Kassel: MS 4° astron. 11.

Tycho Brahe, Opera Omnia, VoL VI, pp. 118–119. For a discussion of Rothmann’s model see Christine Schofield, The Geoheliocentric Hypothesis in Sixteenth-Century Planetary Theory, The British Journal for the History of Science 2 (1965), 291–296.

See Derek J. Price, Is Technology Historically Independent of Science? A Study in Statistical Historiography, Technology and Culture 6 (1965), 553–568; Idem., Structures and Publication in Science and Technology, in Factors in the Transfer of Technology, ed. by William Gruber etal. ( Cambridge, Mass., 1964 ), pp. 91–104.

Title

Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel: Informal Communication and the Aristocratic Context of Discovery